Archive for October, 2001
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Lightweight review of what’s good and what’s bad in the new Office XP help system. Reading it, I’m struck by how bad the new system is. 10:29:26 AM
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uiweb: Strategies of Influence for interaction designers. Step back and examine the dynamics of how decisions are made on your team. Who are the leaders, and whose opinions are respected? Before you present or ask questions at group meetings look at the big picture. Who has influence and how do they exercise it. 6:38:08 PM
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Internet World: Deconstructing Cisco.com. Louis Rosenfeld. There really is no way for someone like me to complete a purchase using the Cisco.com Web site and no explanation as to why this was the case. But there were lots of special cases and distinctions to confuse me. I’ve seen this on a number of sites where resellers are the norm. Pointless. 6:37:54 PM
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Professional XML Schemas: Example and Summary. Shame that XMLSchema is just a little too complex… 6:37:09 PM
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Terrifying. Must be where Caroline got it from. 2:16:54 PM
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Glenn tells us why Apple went with Firewire instead of 802.11b. It also explains what i.Link, etc are. I see the light. 1:22:56 PM
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Working on CityDesk, Part Four. For the umpteenth time, I found myself dependent on a code library which had a crashing bug that was unacceptable in code I shipped. Been in this situation before, only higher level code… 1:22:17 PM
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Dan Bricklin: Web Services, Business Models, and Storage. “To me, the implications are that services must be structured so that people feel they have independent full access and control of their data. One way to do this is to make sure they can easily export it in a form they are comfortable with to keep themselves, or even make that transfer part of the service.” He also discusses the difference between paying for a good and paying for a service: Napster worked because you owned the good after using the service. Streaming music does not work because you don’t own the music once you’re done. 1:12:00 PM
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Good article on why dropdowns and pop-ups/pop-outs don’t work. KEy theme: users decide where to click before moving the mouse, so giving new options as you hover forces a re-evaluation of the choice that has been made. 2:44:57 PM
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Some empirical measures of web page quality compared to the judges decisions in the webby awards. 2:35:29 PM
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Old Lessons Relearned. Sometimes even the master forgets his lessons and has to be re-
taught them by the school of hard knocks. The lesson in this case is
to always benchmark before trying to optimize - don’t assume you know
where the bottleneck is. And don’t forget that the algorithm is often
the most important speed factor. 1:49:40 PM
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Lance Knobel: “It’s extraordinary that in the 21st century, a major economy, Italy, can be largely cut off from commerce because of its reliance on a handful of tunnels through the mountains.” How else would you sort it out though? Surely the issue is having one tunnel with both directions at once. Not ideal. 1:49:04 PM
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John Robb: “I am fairly certain that nobody at Forrester has ever built a major Website.” Amen. 1:48:00 PM
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Puff, the Magic Genome. They’re close to figuring out the genetic sequencing of the Japanese pufferfish. Researchers are getting excited, and here’s why. Essentially the Puffer Fish has far less junk DNA than we do, so can be used to work out which bits of the Humane Genome Project sequences are actually genes. 1:32:34 PM
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Interactive Week: Net Worth. Prudential financial spent nearly $10 million redesigning its web site, but the company isn’t expecting a hard-dollar return on the investment. That might seem strange in these troubled times, but it’s an indication of just how integrated Web assets have become in Prudential’s overall corporate strategy. That’s a lot of spend. Intersting that they don’t care about ROI. 1:31:20 PM
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The Wayback Machine. Massive archive of the historical web. Would be brilliant if you could see anything, but obviously the /. effect has hit them. 1:30:37 PM
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NetRatings grabs Jupiter for $71.2 million. Interesting move. I’m surprised Nielsen let this one go, given their stranglehold over retail measurement. I guess the net market isn’t worth anything right now, so better left alone. 1:29:48 PM
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Flangy: “VBScript is, to put it mildy, not my favorite language.” Makes sense when you look at it this way… 1:25:56 PM
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Reasonably good Zeldman article on what not to do in the downturn. 2:45:15 PM
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What is News Industry Text Format? 2:44:02 PM
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A Linux OS to Challenge MS?. Lindows offers dual binary compatibility for Windows and Linux. I’d use it if it works. That’s the big if. 1:41:03 PM
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Very useful summary of why usability should be part of everyone’s arsenal. 12:38:13 PM
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Frustrating article about micropayments. No-one mentions DoCoMo in the micropayment debate. They’ve been charging vanishingly small amounts of money (to the individual) for various services from the start, and people are happy to pay. Why couldn’t this work on the net, if the content providers and the ISPs got together? Much along the lines of the agreements that allowed so many UK companies to become virtual ISPs - cost sharing of per-minute telephone calls. I guess this is less possible in the US, given the free local call idea. 11:04:13 AM
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Excellent readings around PopTech. 3:19:16 PM
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MIT Technology Review: A Smarter Web. Many feel it can’t be done. Even though things are heating up in research labs, the Semantic Web as envisioned by Berners-Lee is hampered by social and technical challenges that some critics say may never be solved. But that’s not stopping the W3C and other organizations from trying. 3:15:28 PM
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Economist: “Windows XP is the first consumer version of the 15-year-old program in which crashing does not seem to come as a standard feature.” 3:13:17 PM
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Great, great Flash games. 3:10:11 PM
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Chomsky on “The New War Against Terror”. Last night, I attended a talk by Noam Chomsky titled “The New War Against Terror” (the “old” war, Chomsky reminds us, began 20 years ago when the incoming Reagan administration stated that the fight against international terrorism would form the core of its foreign policy). The lecture was educational, expectedly incendiary, and thought provoking, and is something that everyone–Chomsky haters and admirers alike–should hear. Long. 2:25:09 PM
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Mole Day, in honor of Avogadro’s Number, celebrates the number
and Amedeo Avogadro, the man behind the legend. It’s celebrated
annually by chemists world-wide, and is coming up on Tuesday,
October 23. Class. 2:17:02 PM
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Scientific American: The Electronic Paper Chase. There have been intermittent efforts to produce such electronic paper over the past three decades, but only recently has research gone into full swing. The day when Scientific American and other periodicals are routinely published in this medium may come before 2010, thanks to competition between two start-up firms. I want this now. 4:16:09 PM
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Control your computer by grunting. Dr Takeo Igarashi believes that grunts and sighs could be an efficient way to control your computer and appliances. For instance when, you say “move down, ahhhh”, a document would scroll while the sound continues, the scroll speed determined by the pitch of the “ahhhh”. Can you imagine in a call center: it would sound like a farm or a gang bang flick. 1:49:02 PM
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Finally, a nice front end reporting tool for Analog. Now to work out how to make any sense of any of these results… 9:06:46 AM
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I didn’t know that Win2k Server had pretty strong VPN capabilities installed. 9:05:17 AM
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Interview: Jakob Nielsen and Marie Tahir on Homepage Usability. We interview the authors about their upcoming book “Homepage Usability.” Your home page is your company’s public face to the world, it’s important to make a good first impression. Jacob Niesen and Marie Tahir show you how with specific recommendations. They express fairly elegantly why DHTML drop-down menus are pretty awful. Must re-read Norman on affordances. 11:18:42 AM
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Nokia targets youth with new gadget. The Finnish phone maker unveils new cell phone-music player combo targeted at the youth market and a deal with China Mobile Communication. Cooking on gas is the term. What a great idea. I imagine it won’t be cheap, but for kids it’ll be perfect, as they don’t care about the size issue. 2:42:10 PM
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Useful little article about how to think about becoming a customer-focused company. Typically bad URL - what if he writes another article? 11:57:37 AM
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London Times: “The FBI now says that 13 of the 19 hijackers probably did not know they were on a suicide mission.” Compare with ObL’s claim that thousands are ready to die. It’s all propaganda, no? 11:34:57 AM
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Robert Fisk: “Last week, US Secretary of State Colin Powell rapped the Emir of Qatar over the knuckles because – so he claimed – Al-Jazeera was ‘inciting anti-Americanism.’” 4:18:56 PM
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Freelance Victory Blurs Picture. The Supreme Court awards another victory for freelancers, saying National Geographic must pay for republishing a photographer’s works electronically. Linked to the earlier discussion of archiving: if every archive has to pay copyright to the owner, maybe they’ll stop publishing so many archives. In this case, though, we think it’s right to pay the copyright holder. Sometimes we don’t. 4:18:20 PM
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A very useful page explaining where to find information about Radio UserLand. 11:35:41 AM
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Copy Protection Robs the Future. Good Dan Bricklin article on how copy-protecting works today means that we won’t be able to archive them for the future. 11:32:08 AM
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Michael Fraase: “Microsoft intends to control every aspect of digital media, from creation to consumption.” 11:16:58 AM
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About the al-Jazeera TV station. There is an interesting article in the Guardian newspaper about the al-Jazeera TV station: the only TV station to have a live link to Kabul. From the article: In the five years of its existence, al-Jazeera has become the most-watched satellite channel in the Arab world and has infuriated every government from Libya to Kuwait - both of which once threatened to pull out their ambassadors from Qatar in protest. 4:42:04 PM
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Marketplace.Org: Crude Awakenings. “What if Afghanistan was stabilized?” Of course - it’s all about oil… 1:29:03 PM
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Visionary lays into the web.. BBC News: Visionary lays into the web. For all his talk about the wonderfulness of Xanadu, Nelson has yet to convince me that the features it claims to provide are realistically implementable. 1:27:29 PM
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Column | Web Travel Planning. Optimizing the interaction among web services isn’t in the interest of the providers. Could a peer-to-peer application help us do it for ourselves? Interesting article looking at how frictionless, transparent commerce might work. 11:51:31 AM
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Frightening article on how a smallpox terrorist attack might spread. Ironic if it doubled back on those that launched it… 1:12:10 PM
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Practicing Information Architecture. Sep 1. SIG meeting notes from CHI 2001. A little bit of a shame that no-one ever says anything really interesting in the PPT versions of these sessions. 11:59:36 AM
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What’s with the attitude?. “for every complaint you actually get, ten thousand people were mad at you but didn’t bother to write”. Unverified and unsourced, but an interesting number. There’s obviously a huge scaling issue between the number of complaints you see and the number there actually are. 11:41:59 AM
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Really interesting site for architecture. Some particularly good shots of the WTC, especially one before No. 7 was built. 3:12:18 PM
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Cracking stuff: “we put braille on drive up automatic tellers”. 1:59:17 PM
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Highgate East is apparently where we bought the expensive sieve where we now live (Whitehall Park is mentioned in the article). 3:00:41 PM
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Cracking interview with Peter Drucker. I wonder if he confuses the web and the internet. He’s pretty good though, so maybe I should stop separating them? 1:37:43 PM
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Easy Web Content Management. Content management systems needn’t rely exclusively on server-side tools. Using XSL transformations, XMLcmNOW lets you create and manage an XML-based site locally with direct FTP updates to the server. Interesting if a little geeky therefore non-user friendly. 6:33:50 PM
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Crypto-Gram: The Attacks. Bruce Schneier. Excellent summary of why some of the security measures being taken are pointless. 6:31:17 PM
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Prayer and in-vitro fertilization. In what appears to be a pretty well-designed study, doctors at Columbia have demonstrated that prayer nearly doubles the success rate of in-vitro fertilization. This is “intecessory prayer” or multiple groups of people praying for the women, not the women themselves praying. Extraordinary. 3:39:31 PM
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